1. Field of the Invention.
This invention relates to waterbound facilities serving the extraction of energy from the water current in which it is moored, and using it for powering the production machinery on board. It is an object of this invention to apply the advantages of cycloidal turbines having blade assemblies of aircraft type wing and tail configuration, being pitch controlled by reciprocating tail surfaces through the full range of advance ratios, as in detail described in my invention Ser. No. 906,879 "Cycloidal Fluid Flow Engine", now U.S. Pat. No. 4,247,251 for achieving new and useful improvements in floating facilities utilizing the low density energy of ocean currents.
To further develop the extraction of useful energy from ocean currents, by allowing a floating power system to follow a captive path to increase the relative fluid velocity, the patent application titled "Captive Water Current Power System" Ser. No. 206185 was filed on 11/12/80.
Further refinements of the "Cycloidal Fluid Flow Engine" patented in Pat. No. 4,247,251 are pending per patent application Ser. No. 185502 titled "Alternating Lift Wing System" filed on 09/09/80.
2. Description of the Prior Art.
It is known that many ocean currents have huge amounts of energy, for instance the Gulf Stream along Florida has about 25 million KW of kinetic energy. However, the prior art did not reach any useful solutions for extracting this energy, because of its incompatibility with the low energy density in such current in concert with the corrosive environment and sometimes extreme storm conditions.